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Leo Dillon, along with his team at the State Department, works to make sure the U.S. government's maps are aligned with its policies. Dillon discusses in this Q-and-A how his unit responds to naming issues, border disputes and the creation of new countries. "Every time a new country comes by, it shakes up the order," he said. "Usually you have a lot of advance notice, but it still gets complicated."

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Rivers carve down rock at different speeds through time, which means researchers may have to rethink how they measure erosion, according to a study in Nature. "River incision is the yardstick we use to measure a lot of processes. There were a lot of reasons to think these things were in equilibrium, but you can't simply take a rate and tell a story with that rate," said lead author Noah Finnegan, a University of California, Santa Cruz, geomorphologist.

Domestic migration is helping to spark population growth in North Carolina, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. About 100,000 more people were living in the state on July 1, 2013, compared with the previous year, and 38% of that increase was due to migration from other states. The increase is a bit puzzling given that the state's job market is not particularly strong, said Keith Debbage, a geographer at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. "I would suspect and assume that some of that may be the ongoing retirement migration," he said. "I can't imagine that a whole host of people are coming into the state looking for jobs."

Construction projects being undertaken in Brazil as part of the preparation for the World Cup soccer tournament have forced some residents -- especially poor ones -- to relocate. Some government officials say the World Cup is not the cause for most displacements, while activists say as many as 250,000 people across the country face evictions because of the event and other projects. "Brazil is by far and away the champion of forced removals," said Fluminense Federal University visiting geography professor Christopher Gaffney. "This is clearly the most impactful World Cup ever, with a lot of ambitious projects."

CITIC Pacific Mining has teamed up with Esri Australia to develop a GIS mapping and reporting system to manage underground infrastructure such as electrical lines and slurry pipelines. The system can be accessed via a Web browser for onsite reporting and allows surveyors to "view data such as electrical, location and access in layers which can be examined alongside other important information such as high resolution photography and above-ground infrastructure," CITIC Pacific Mining senior GIS analyst Chris Brown said.

Shortly after the death of actor Jerry Orbach, who played Detective Lennie Briscoe on "Law & Order," his fan base tuned in to see his portrayal of the scowling investigator once again. For the week ending Jan. 9, an episode of "Law & Order" on TNT was the most-watched show on ad-supported cable television, attracting 4.4 million total viewers.